Combat spam with Gmail

Spam free

I’ve done a pretty good job of keeping my personal email address away from spammers. Such a good job that for a matter of months, maybe even a year, I haven’t had any spam in my personal Gmail account at all…

Until now. The email address that I give out on the internet is probably full of spam, but since Gmail’s spam filter is so good, and I read messages to that address in Mail.app, I don’t notice the spam there. I generally use my personal account for friends, people I meet in real life, work, and real life memberships and newsletters (such as Just Jeans, Myer, Borders). I’ve noticed in the last couple of months that the spam folder has a new bold number next to it in my personal account. Most days it only says (2), but it ticks me off and I have to go in and delete them.

I’d love to know who gave my email address away.

Apparently there’s a little trick that could have helped me find that out, if I’d known about it sooner.

Keep your email address safe(ish)

If you use a Gmail account, you can use a suffix to your username in your email address that will tell you who the email is coming from.

Take an example (not a real one, you can email me on my contact page though), example@gmail.com. If I give that to you guys as example+blog@gmail.com, then I know that you’ve obtained my email address from my blog. Or, I could sign up for Twitter and give email address as example+twitter@gmail.com. Then, if I get spam from that address, I know that it was Twitter who betrayed my trust and gave my email address to those under-handed, amoral marketers.

I admit, this doesn’t exactly help prevent spam, but at least you know who is giving (or possibly even selling!) your email address. If you want to, you could cleave business with them or take action against them (if they promised not to share your address).

Update 19 Aug, 2008: I’ve tried to use this a couple of times, but it hasn’t worked because some websites don’t consider ‘+’ to be a valid email character, even though it is.

Disclaimer: I have seen no evidence to suggest that Twitter do anything dodgy, so far they have offered a faithful service. They just seemed like relevant example.

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Comments

I read an article that said harvester bots scan pages for anything that resembles a prefix@suffix.domain format, so even if it’s de-linked, your address is at risk of being picked up by spammers. That’s why I don’t have any directly clickable text email links on my site, and the one time I do mention it in my contact page it’s displayed as a graphic. WordPress has a reliable function that scrambles your email, but I prefer my method. Didn’t know about the GMail method though. 🙂

Pelf, I guess I didn’t explain it specifically, but they’re not separate email addresses. The “+something” doesn’t mean anything to Gmail and it sends it to your regular email account. It just means that you can see who you gave your email address to.

Gio, I’m sure that bots do scan for that sort of thing, which is why I use a separate email address for internet stuff and I’m not angry when my internet email gets spammed. I’ve put it out there for people to use. It’s also why I’m annoyed that my personal email is getting spammed: I went for ages without any spam, which leads me to believe the current spam is not random. Hope your image method works for you.

Yahoo! Business accounts have a similar thing. I pick a prefix like lkrause224 and then I can tack on any suffixes, like prefix-sample@yahoo.com. These are throw away email addresses so I can delete them whenever I want. I’ve created a -junk for all this stuff I have to sign up an email with and don’t want. I do my best to never give out my real email to anyone.

…won’t bots be able to pick up the email address you put in your post even though it doesn’t have a link attached?

So do you actually have to create those addresses in Yahoo or do you just give them out and they still get mailed to you? In Google they just get redirected to your account (I think, I haven’t actually done this myself).

Yep, the bots can probably see those addresses. I figured that since my email address is on my contact page it’s already been scraped anyway. I could change them to example.com email address. Maybe I will sometime.